Category Archives: Social Media

Social media today encompasses more than just being social on the web. It is part of a larger marketing campaign, promotion and advertising, pushing and pulling your audience to and from your content. It’s a complicated area but critical to the success of your business and online experience.
The articles in this category represent tips, tutorials, and educational material related to Lorelle’s classes, workshops, and trainings. For more information see Lorelle on WordPress and Liz Strauss.

The following are the workshop notes for a presentation I gave recently to Portland Community College’s Technical Writing class. The topic was on web writing and writing for the web.

The main topics I covered in the workshop included:

Web platforms

Web publishing

Online personas

Writing for the Web

Web writing structure and format

Myths and Facts

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Demographics

Writing for your audience

Terminology

The following are terms and jargon used in blogging and social media.

Blogging: Publishing on the web through websites (blogs) and social media. Facebooking and Twitter are blogging, specifically microblogging.

Photoblogging: Publishing photography and words on the web through websites and social media.

Vlogging: Publishing video on the web.

Podcasting: Publishing scheduled and syndicated multimedia content on the web.

Social Media: Online marketing and community building.

SEO: (Search Engine Optimization) The process of making a site search engine friendly through code and content. Modern term for developing a site for search engine attention and distribution, aka marketing.

Web Publishing: Publishing on the web, sharing multimedia content in the virtual community.

Syndication: The distribution of content on the web through feeds.

Blog: A blog is a website with content displayed in reverse chronological order.

The story of Google+ Hangouts begins with Google Talk, a competitor to Skype and other Voice-Over-Internet Services. As technology developed, Google experimented with a variety of web-based collaborative systems, including Google Docs, their free alernative to Microsoft Office, and the innovative Google Wave.

Google Wave brought live conversation to the online collaboration experience. People could work on a document together, share their screen, watch videos, and create artwork together. It was a chance to create preserved documentation of their real-time collaboration.

It failed.

Promoted as the “replacement for email” and “the future of online collaboration,” while it had the tools Google assumed people wanted, it didn’t meet expectations. Many lessons were learned by Google and the tech community from the failure, including how not to over-hype expectations for your product, how not to launch prematurely, and don’t expect people to know what to do with it when they finally gain access.

Google took the knocks and lessons learned from Google Wave, Google Buzz, and Google Docs and applied them to the successful Google+ social media network, which incorporates all of the Google products into one umbrella platform, including the collaborative tool called Google+ Hangouts.

Google+ and Google+ Hangouts are now revolutionizing the world of online communication, especially for the educational industry. Continue reading →

There are many ways to subscribe to a WordPress site. There are also many different types of subscriptions.

Here is an example list of the various ways a person can subscribe to your site’s posts.

Email Subscription: Readers sign up for an email notification when new content is published on the website.

Follow: There are many types of follows, adding the site’s activity to your social media stream. WordPress.com offers Follows with the option to get email notifications as well as the site streamed in your Blog Follows stream.

Feeds: Feeds are the syndicated and distributable version of your content. People use feed readers to keep up with the latest activity on their favorite sites.

A subscription is different from a share. Sharing is a one-time event. The shared article information is not an act of subscribing to or adding the site to your social web stream of information. A subscription is not just support but a choice by the reader to keep up with that site’s activities.

Subscribers are your site’s fan club.

This tutorial will focus on the three types of subscriptions, email, follow, and feeds, to help you promote these subscription options on your WordPress site.

As you add subscription options to your site, check out what your site looks like through email notifications, follows, and feeds. When you design a WordPress Theme, it is important to design for all the ways a site will be viewed and accessed.

For example, the image to the right in this article is a screenshot of a post article on Mashable, a popular online magazine featuring tech news. The designer has incorporated social media sharing, sharing stats, and encouragement of social sharing and subscriptions into the design of the site title area. The little worm-like line to the right of the sharing icons is a trending chart. It shows the popularity of the article based upon the social sharing, showing you the possible creative options.

As you go through this tutorial, examine the traditional examples used to promote sharing and subscription options, but consider how to creatively incorporate sharing and subscriptions into the design of the WordPress Theme. If you are designing for the public with a WordPress Theme, remember that users will customize menus and widgetized areas with their own ideas on where and how to place these icons and links. Give them options but have fun with these as well.Continue reading →

An editorial calendar is critical for the online publisher and web worker today. In traditional media, an editorial calendar was the year planned out in advance on editorial topics, articles, themes, article series, and events. Today, the editorial calendar goes even further covering social media, marketing, advertising, and virtual and direct social interaction. Whether for the individual blogger or a company, an editorial calendar sets goals and deadlines to keep you on track.Continue reading →

The Yahoo Pipes Social Media Fire Hose searches across Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed, Digg, various search engines, and even includes blog comments. It creates a custom feed you can then add to your feed reader.

Originally created for public relations, advertising, and marketing tracking across the online social networks and media, this is a great way to find out what others are saying about you and your blog, your brand, or anything. I’ve been using it to track information on WordPress such as WordPress Tips, WordPress Plugins, and WordPress Themes, as well as my name, blog name, and URL and feedback from various blogs I work for and with.

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas was one of the earliest models for helping to visualize the conversations that define the social web.

Created originally in August of 2008, it has been updated several times as social media networks and trends have changed.

The prism chart is a bit hard to see on a web page, so let’s break it down into digestible parts.

Inside the Chart

The original version one and two of the Conversation Prism spelled out strategies for business communication and the social web. It bears highlighting as part of our conversation on marketing within the social web.

Version 3, shown at the top, removes the center strategies, focusing totally on listening. Many businesses don’t “get” what listening really means when it comes to the social web.

The Brand is the core of the circular chart representing the end goal: marketing the brand. From this, all things branch out as the goal must be served by the actions within the social web.

Wrapped around the inner Brand circle is a ring, called a halo, listing: Observation, Listening, Identification, Internalization, Prioritization, and Routing. These are the definitions of observing, listening, or participating in social media.

The next halo represents the “intersection of all public facing departments,” which is the business departments or titles to create a social media Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy. They include Customer or Product Support, Product and Sales, Marketing/PR, Community, Corporate Communications, Crisis, and Support.

Halo three is described as the completion of the conversational workflow powered by “continual rotation of listening, responding, and learning online and in the real world.” It is represented by ongoing feedback and insight, participation, online and real world relationships and communication.

The outer part of the circle highlights the specific social media services sorted by subject matter and interest such as Questions and Answers found through Quora and LinkedIn, and Wikis with Wikipedia, TWiki, Wika, and other wiki-based sites and services.

The Air Force Web Posting Response Assessment was created by the Air Force Public Affairs Agency’s Emerging Technology Division to create a flow chart path for responding to comments in social media and blogs. While designed for blogs and blog comments, it works across all social networks and online and off-line communications. It’s caught the attention of the social media industry as a solid strategy that businesses should consider when training their staff handling web communications and marketing and establishing clear communication guidelines.

The chart is divided into four areas: Discover, Evaluate, Respond, and Response Considerations. In reality, it covers three areas, Discovery, Evaluation, and Response, as Response Considerations are part of the evaluation.

In general, the chart explains comment responses:

Before responding, consider the source of the response and their attitude and objectives.

Decide how to respond based upon the attitude and objectives of the commenter.

Write the response in consideration of tone, influence, timeliness, transparency, and sourcing (justification and evidence).

Evaluate response and continued conversation, if any, for future considerations and actions.

Among the response options are to monitor only (let the comment stand but take no immediate action), respond with facts to fix the commenter’s falicies or support the original position, respond with a solution to rectify the situation and restore calm and reasonable perspectives, and to reinforce your position positively by “sharing success” and restating your story and mission.

Lorelle VanFossen is a trainer and educator on web publishing, blogging, social media, user experience (UX), podcasting, multimedia, and WordPress. This is her educational blog featuring tutorials, instructions, guides, resources, and references (and homework) for students and workshop participants.

About Lorelle Teaches

Lorelle VanFossen is a trainer and educator on web publishing, blogging, social media, user experience (UX), podcasting, multimedia, and WordPress. This is her educational blog featuring tutorials, instructions, guides, resources, and references (and homework) for students and workshop participants.